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A New Look at an Old Favorite for Adventure Seekers: La Paz, Mexico

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Wednesday, April 3, 2024

Sign up for the Travel Dispatch newsletter. Essential news on the changing travel landscape, expert tips and inspiration for your future trips. For our last night in La Paz, Mexico, we kept it simple: A couple of cans of cold Pacifico, a bench on the malecón, the city’s waterfront promenade, and the sunset glowing orange over the shimmering silver-blue Sea of Cortez. My husband, Alex, and I had spent nearly a week taking scenic desert drives and lazy city strolls, visiting stunning beaches and mountains, and enjoying a steady diet of fish tacos and mezcalitas. But now we were salt-coated and sinking into a blissful exhaustion that comes only after a day spent scuba diving.La Paz is the capital of Baja California Sur, the Mexican state where some 42 percent of the land and water are natural protected areas, and the city lies on the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California, considered one of the world’s most diverse marine environments. Travelers have long been drawn to the region’s glorious outdoors, a distinctive mix of ocean and red-hued desert, to spend days not only diving, but also sailing, kayaking, fishing, kite surfing, mountain biking, camping and hiking.In recent years, the city has maintained its strong commitment to environmental conservation, but has also welcomed new restaurants and accommodations, meeting a growing desire among many travelers to Mexico for authentic experiences found beyond the walls of an enormous resort.“This is an adventure destination,” said Luz Maria Zepeda, the director of the city’s tourism board. “We want people who want to explore, who want to preserve the environment the way it is, and to help us protect it.”Growth, but kept in checkHome to around 300,000 people, La Paz has a decidedly laid-back feel — “The Peace,” it’s aptly named — and is often overshadowed by Los Cabos, a municipality on the state’s southernmost tip that includes San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas, as well as by tiny Todos Santos, a stylish destination for art and food on the Pacific Coast.Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

New hotels and destination-worthy restaurants now compliment the ever-appealing outdoors surrounding La Paz, the capital of Baja California Sur.

Sign up for the Travel Dispatch newsletter. Essential news on the changing travel landscape, expert tips and inspiration for your future trips.

For our last night in La Paz, Mexico, we kept it simple: A couple of cans of cold Pacifico, a bench on the malecón, the city’s waterfront promenade, and the sunset glowing orange over the shimmering silver-blue Sea of Cortez. My husband, Alex, and I had spent nearly a week taking scenic desert drives and lazy city strolls, visiting stunning beaches and mountains, and enjoying a steady diet of fish tacos and mezcalitas. But now we were salt-coated and sinking into a blissful exhaustion that comes only after a day spent scuba diving.

La Paz is the capital of Baja California Sur, the Mexican state where some 42 percent of the land and water are natural protected areas, and the city lies on the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California, considered one of the world’s most diverse marine environments. Travelers have long been drawn to the region’s glorious outdoors, a distinctive mix of ocean and red-hued desert, to spend days not only diving, but also sailing, kayaking, fishing, kite surfing, mountain biking, camping and hiking.

In recent years, the city has maintained its strong commitment to environmental conservation, but has also welcomed new restaurants and accommodations, meeting a growing desire among many travelers to Mexico for authentic experiences found beyond the walls of an enormous resort.

“This is an adventure destination,” said Luz Maria Zepeda, the director of the city’s tourism board. “We want people who want to explore, who want to preserve the environment the way it is, and to help us protect it.”

Growth, but kept in check

Home to around 300,000 people, La Paz has a decidedly laid-back feel — “The Peace,” it’s aptly named — and is often overshadowed by Los Cabos, a municipality on the state’s southernmost tip that includes San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas, as well as by tiny Todos Santos, a stylish destination for art and food on the Pacific Coast.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

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This Month in Conservation Science: Trojan Seahorses and ‘Vampire’ Birds

Journals this month looked at “fabulous but forgotten” ecosystems, hungry monkeys, roaming lions, lead-poisoned birds, and more — including a focus on microplastics. The post This Month in Conservation Science: Trojan Seahorses and ‘Vampire’ Birds appeared first on The Revelator.

When I worked for a major academic publisher in the early 2000s, Christmas came twice a year: once in December and once when the annual Journal Citation Reports came out. The JCR, published every year since 1975, ranks academic journals against each other. Each journal receives something called an “impact factor,” a calculation based on how many papers a journal publishes and how many times its papers are cited by subsequent research within two years. This is a very big deal in scientific circles. The higher the impact factor, the more readily the publisher can sell a journal to libraries and other institutions and the more likely the journal is to receive high-quality submissions. That, in turn, helps keep future impact factors high. It’s not a perfect system. Smaller journals — such as those from the Global South or those covering narrow topics — don’t get cited as often, so they may not receive a high impact factor. That doesn’t mean they don’t have an impact, though: Recent research found that these smaller, niche journals actually have a greater effect on policy — particularly when it comes to protecting endangered species. Meanwhile there are plenty of other ways to assess a journal’s impact. Media mentions are also a big deal, and many journals now publish statistics for each paper’s news links or social-media shares. It could be argued that nonscientific citations have a greater effect on policy and public perception than anything else. So let’s dive into those smaller journals and share the latest science from other conservation journals around the world. Below you’ll find more than three dozen papers that grabbed my attention in the past few weeks. They cover “vampire” birds, hungry monkeys, feral cats, roaming lions, the wildlife trade, and more. Most of the articles are open access, so they should be available to researchers (and any other interested readers) around the globe. Will they also shape policy? That remains to be seen, but some of these papers have only been downloaded a couple of hundred times as of this writing, so let’s give them a fighting chance. “Animal-borne sensors reveal high human impact on soundscapes near a critical sea turtle nesting beach” (Biological Conservation) “Are vehicle strikes causing millions of bee deaths per day on western United States roads? Preliminary data suggests the number is high” (Sustainable Environment) “Camouflage or Coincidence? Investigating the Effects of Spatial and Temporal Environmental Features on Feral Cat Morphology in Tasmania” (Ecology and Evolution) “Climatic drought and trophic disruption in an endemic subalpine Hawaiian forest bird” (Biological Conservation) “Conserving genetic diversity hotspots under climate change: Are protected areas helpful?” (Biological Conservation) “Counterillumination reduces bites by Great White sharks” (Current Biology) “Diurnal Activity Budgets and Feeding Habits of Grivet Monkey (Chlorocebus aethiops aethiops) in Fragmented Moist Afromontane Forest” (African Journal of Ecology) “Environmental Conservation and the Bulawayo CBD as a Linguistic Landscape Construction: An Ecolinguistics Perspective” (Journal of Asian and African Studies) “Fabulous but Forgotten Fucoid Forests” (Ecology and Evolution) “Facing the heat: nestlings of a cavity-nesting raptor trade safety for food when exposed to high nest temperatures” (Animal Behaviour) “Great Gerbils (Rhombomys opimus) in Central Asia Are Spreading to Higher Latitudes and Altitudes” (Ecology and Evolution) “Large Reductions in Temperate Rainforest Biome Due to Unmitigated Climate Change” (Earth’s Future) “Lead-based ammunition is a threat to the endangered New Zealand Kea (Nestor notabilis)” (Conservation Letters) “Madagascar’s proposed domestic rosewood trade undermines species protection and exposes fatal flaws in the CITES regime” (Madagascar Conservation & Development) “Native plants play crucial role in buffering against severity of exotic plant invasions in freshwater ecosystems” (Biological Conservation) “Nearly half of Colombian artisan craft plant species lack national and international vulnerability assessments” (Ecosystems and People) “Predicting conservation priority areas in Borneo for the critically endangered helmeted hornbill (Rhinoplax vigil)” (Global Ecology and Conservation) “Predicting the potential habitat of bears under a changing climate in Nepal” (Environmental Monitoring and Assessment) “Requiem for Argentine mammals: A spatial framework for mapping extinction risk,” (Journal of Nature Conservation) “Sacred Groves and the Conservation of Forest Genetic Resources: a review” (Egyptian Academic Journal of Biological Sciences) “The Trojan seahorse: citizen science pictures of a seahorse harbour insights into the distribution and behaviour of a long-overlooked polychaete worm” (Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences) “‘Vampire birds’: diet metabarcoding reveals that migrating Woodchat Shrikes Lanius senator consume engorged camel ticks in a desert stopover site” (Journal of African Ornithology) The Interplay of Lions and African Wild Dogs These papers, which examine some of the same species but share no authors, deserve to be looked at in unison: “Long-Distance, Transfrontier Carnivore Dispersals in Southern Africa” (Ecology and Evolution) “Spatial Risk Effects From Lions Compound Impacts of Prey Depletion on African Wild Dogs” (Ecology and Evolution) “Droughts reshape apex predator space use and intraguild overlap” (Journal of Animal Ecology) Focus on Microplastics This month also featured a lot of research on microplastics — as many as 10 papers a day, by my count. Here’s a small selection focusing on microplastics’ effects on wildlife. This weighs a little more heavily on subscription-access papers, but many of these are open access. “Bibliometric Insights into Microplastic Pollution in Freshwater Ecosystems” (Water) “The dual role of coastal mangroves: Sinks and sources of microplastics in rapidly urbanizing areas” (Journal of Hazardous Materials) “Ecotoxicological Impact of Cigarette Butts on Coastal Ecosystems: The Case of Marbella Beach, Chile” (Sustainability) “From insects to mammals! Tissue accumulation and transgenerational transfer of micro/nano-plastics through the food chain” (Journal of Hazardous Materials) “Is pollution giving fish a headache? Biomarker analysis in fish brains from Danube floodplain” (13th International Symposium Kopački Rit: Past, Present, Future 2024) “Microplastics alter the functioning of marine microbial ecosystems” (Ecology and Evolution) “Microplastics and terrestrial birds: a review on plastic ingestion in ecological linchpins” (Journal of Ornithology) “Microplastics in Animals: The Silent Invasion” (Pollutants) “Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) microplastics affect angiogenesis and central nervous system (CNS) development of duck embryo” (Emerging Contaminants) “Unraveling Plastic Pollution in Protected Terrestrial Raptors Using Regurgitated Pellets” (Microplastics) Our next column will be a bit different: We want to share researchers’ favorite peer-reviewed papers of 2024. For consideration, drop us a line at tips@therevelator.org and use the subject line TMICS. Send us a link, your name and institution, and 1-3 sentences about why you think readers should check out your paper. We’re eager to hear from you, especially if you’re from the Global South or an institution without much public-relations support. (Deadline: Dec. 10, 2024.) Scroll down to find our “Republish” button Previously in The Revelator: This Month in Conservation Science: ‘The Earth Is Dying, Bro’ The post This Month in Conservation Science: Trojan Seahorses and ‘Vampire’ Birds appeared first on The Revelator.

Conservation

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Climate

Biden administration offers alternatives for Colorado River’s long-term operations

Biden administration officials on Wednesday announced several potential alternatives for the Colorado River's long-term management, as the expiration date for the current rules approaches. The five alternatives will be considered as possible replacements for the 2007 Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages, which are valid through the end of 2026. These rules will steer conservation policies for a 1,450-mile river that provides water to about 40 million people in the U.S. and Mexico. "We're in a moment for solutions and leadership," Acting Deputy Interior Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis said on a Wednesday press call. "Today, we're putting forth alternatives that have established a robust and fair framework for a basin-wide agreement." The Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation, which is overseeing the revisions in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), had given Colorado River basin states an early March 2024 cutoff date for submitting a consensus-backed alternative themselves. The U.S. portion of the Colorado River region is split into a Lower and an Upper basin, which, respectively, include California, Arizona and Nevada, and Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico. Back in March, the two basins were unable to come to a unified agreement and ended up filing competing proposals for the river's long-term management. The Lower Basin states had agreed to reductions of their own while also placing an emphasis on shared cuts across the whole watershed — basing storage capacity totals not just on the massive Lake Powell and Lake Mead, but also on other smaller reservoirs in the Upper Basin. The Upper Basin states, on the other hand, submitted a plan that they felt would better reflect changing hydrological conditions in a region where water supplies come from mountain snowpack. In the absence of a March consensus, the federal government on Wednesday released its own alternatives, which will undergo extensive analysis in a forthcoming draft environmental impact statement (EIS). Those alternatives, according to the Interior Department, reflect elements proposed by basin states, tribes, cooperating agencies and non-governmental organizations. "We have laid the foundation to ensure that future guidelines and strategies will be sufficiently robust and adaptive to withstand the uncertainty of climate change impacts," Daniel-Davis said. The release of the proposed alternatives on Wednesday serves to facilitate a "timely development of final operating guidelines that will need to be in place by August of 2026," explained Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton, on the same press call. Touton stressed that there are no preferred alternatives and that the options "represent a wide range of actions that provide improved predictability of water availability, enhanced opportunities for conservation and respond to a broad spectrum of hydrology." The proposals include four viable alternatives as well as a fifth "no action" alternative, which Touton explained is simply a NEPA requirement but would involve reverting to guidelines in place prior to 2007. Alternative 4, a "Basin Hybrid" plan, attempts to include portions of the plans submitted by the Upper Basin, Lower Basin and tribal nations. That option, according to the Interior Department, could help facilitate collaborative action among stakeholders. 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Under this option, a large share of Lower Basin cutbacks would be based on the seven-reservoir storage capacity, recent hydrology and voluntary contributions from the two basins. In Alternative 2, called the "Federal Authorities Hybrid," Lake Powell releases would be based on a combination of Lake Powell and Lake Mead elevations, hydrological records and Lower Basin deliveries. Shortage responsibilities under this plan would be triggered entirely by the combined seven-reservoir storage capacity and distributed proportionally among parties. A "Federal Authorities" option, Alternative 1, would provide "robust protection of critical infrastructure" within the federal government’s current statutory authorities. Lake Powell released would be based on Lake Powell's elevations, with Lower Basin shortages distributed based on the region's century-old water rights priority system. "These alternatives represent a responsible range from which to build the best and most robust path forward for the basin," Touton said. "There certainly are extremely difficult choices and tradeoffs to be made, but we believe that there are ample opportunities to create a fair path to solutions that work for the entire region." In addition to presenting the alternatives, the Biden administration officials also devoted ample time in the Wednesday press call commending the progress made under President Biden on Colorado River issues. Daniel-Davis recalled how "in 2021, impacts of a historic drought in the West brought the Colorado River Basin and the communities it serves to a near crisis," stressing how Lake Mead and Lake Powell plunged to critically low elevations. But she touted the administration's "all-of-government approach" and "really bold and decisive action" for helping solve the crisis. Touton offered a similar perspective, adding, "We were able to bring the Colorado River into the back in the break of the worst drought in 1,800 years." White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi, credited not only the administration, but also the region's bipartisan partners for bringing "the river back from the brink." He commended U.S. West governors by name, and from both sides of the aisle, for their work on natural resource conservation and for recognizing the strain on the Colorado River system. Zaidi described the alternatives as "a playbook to come together once again, to meet the urgent need of stabilizing situation beyond 2026." In response to the Interior Department's publication of alternatives, JB Hamby, Colorado River commissioner for California, said in a statement that "federal law requires the Colorado River Basin’s reservoirs be managed in accordance with the Colorado River Compact." The most significant components of that 1922 water agreement, Hamby stated, are "mandatory deliveries of water from the Upper Basin to the Lower Basin and Mexico." "In order to be valid, any alternative considered must meet this requirement unless the states agree to a compromise otherwise," he said. Becky Mitchell, Colorado River commissioner for the state of Colorado, said in a statement her state did not have specific comments on the alternatives "at this time." "Colorado continues to stand firmly behind the Upper Division States’ Alternative," she said, noting that this proposal is supply-driven and aims to boost Lake Powell and Lake Mead while protecting Colorado's "significant rights and interests" in the river. "Colorado remains committed to working collaboratively with the other Basin States, the federal government and tribal Nations towards a consensus approach and also stands ready to protect our State’s significant interests in the Colorado River," Mitchell added. In a separate press call following the Interior Department's announcement, Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, told reporters that he needed "a lot more time to digest all this." While he noted "some really positive elements to these alternatives," he also said that he was "disappointed that Reclamation chose to create alternatives, rather than to model the Lower Basin state alternative in its entirety." "It didn't start at one extreme or the other, and it showed unequivocally that the Lower Basin was willing to take the first tranche of cuts," Buschatzke added.

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Surprising Surge: How Florida’s Manatees Are Thriving More Than Ever

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Second Teen Charged in New Jersey Forest Fire as Rain Should Help Douse New York Blaze

A second teenager has been charged with intentionally setting a wildfire in a New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia

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Igniting Change: Maui Brush Fires

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When Worlds Collide: A Formosan Black Bear's Deadly Dance with Civilization

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Animals

Giants of Big Sur: California Condor Stories Part 2: Leading the Way with Non-Lead

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They are among the rarest animals in the world: lynxes, European minks, swamp turtles and ground squirrels. They all once disappeared from Germany. In an attempt to rewild Germanys nature, they are now returning. The film follows their individual journeys back to the wild. For those who are now reclaiming their old habitat, it is a long and dangerous road.

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Total Disaster

Armed with realistic bird puppets, trickster environmental activists pretend to be oil company Total—staging a satirical press conference to introduce "RéHabitat," a program to rescue animals from the East African Oil Pipeline by relocating them to “more sustainable” habitats. Using humor and mischief, they expose a deadly ecological disaster in a zany effort to help #StopEACOP.

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A New Look at an Old Favorite for Adventure Seekers: La Paz, Mexico

Growth, but kept in check

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Total Disaster

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A New Look at an Old Favorite for Adventure Seekers: La Paz, Mexico

Growth, but kept in check

Related News

This Month in Conservation Science: Trojan Seahorses and ‘Vampire’ Birds

Biden administration offers alternatives for Colorado River’s long-term operations

Surprising Surge: How Florida’s Manatees Are Thriving More Than Ever

Second Teen Charged in New Jersey Forest Fire as Rain Should Help Douse New York Blaze

Costa Rica Faces Must-Win Battle Against Panama in Nations League Quarterfinal

Suggested Viewing

Igniting Change: Maui Brush Fires

When Worlds Collide: A Formosan Black Bear's Deadly Dance with Civilization

Giants of Big Sur: California Condor Stories Part 2: Leading the Way with Non-Lead

Coming Home - Back to the Wild

Total Disaster

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sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

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